Promotional Campaign Duration and Word-of-Mouth in Solar Panel Adoption

70 Pages Posted: 21 Aug 2023 Last revised: 30 Nov 2023

See all articles by Bryan Bollinger

Bryan Bollinger

New York University (NYU) - Department of Marketing

Kenneth Gillingham

Yale University

Stefan Lamp

University of Toulouse 1 - Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Tsvetan Tsvetanov

University of Kansas

Date Written: November 28, 2023

Abstract

Intensive marketing campaigns can be used to increase awareness, consideration, purchase, and word-of-mouth (WOM) of pro-social products. With expanded interest and belief in how social norms and spillovers might be leveraged to combat climate change, it is critical to understand how campaigns designed to leverage such peer effects can be best designed. In this paper, we study the role of campaign duration in solar photovoltaic adoption using a large-scale field experiment, in which we randomly assign communities to campaigns with shorter durations, increasing the marketing intensity to maintain the same total resources per campaign. We find that the longer campaigns generate more WOM and lead to more adoption post-campaign, despite a comparable number of installations during the campaigns. The shorter campaigns led to 22.6 fewer installations per town in the two years after the campaigns concluded, leading to a cost per acquisition of $4,367 versus $2,029 in the longer campaigns, the latter being lower than installers' self-reported acquisition costs, and the former being substantially higher.

Keywords: Durable good adoption, promotional campaign duration, word-of-mouth, field experiments, pro-social marketing

Suggested Citation

Bollinger, Bryan and Gillingham, Kenneth and Lamp, Stefan and Tsvetanov, Tsvetan, Promotional Campaign Duration and Word-of-Mouth in Solar Panel Adoption (November 28, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4546332 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4546332

Bryan Bollinger (Contact Author)

New York University (NYU) - Department of Marketing ( email )

40 W 4th St
Tisch 804
New York, NY 10012
United States

Kenneth Gillingham

Yale University ( email )

493 College St
New Haven, CT CT 06520
United States

Stefan Lamp

University of Toulouse 1 - Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) ( email )

1, Esplanade de l Universite
Toulouse, 31080
France

Tsvetan Tsvetanov

University of Kansas ( email )

1415
Lawrence, KS 66045
United States

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